from NER 40.4 (2019)
Three days two nights in a metal box laddering
down the barren heartland of the republic.
Land blistered by drought & the blight of small towns:
fratricide, religion & mass-distributed snuff
films in the paan shops. I was a boy trying to get home,
always trying to get home those days the city
flinging me out. For hours I read The Stranger,
counted the mullions on the windows
pushing my feet against the warm breathing wall
of aluminum & sunmica, drifting in a heat
induced slumber on the upper berths where no hijra
could reach over & pinch my cock. Outside,
the precision of metal & wheels: long blue metaphor
of the wandering womb in transit. I saw
storms lash the ruined fields, lightning bolts tenfold
brighter than all the village’s light bulbs
put together. Four pukka houses with electricity,
one with telephone & no police station
for miles. The sun bearing down infernal since dawn,
breathing fissures into the earth. Men sitting
under a peepal tree in the evenings defeated by heat
& no wind, men whose knowledge of snow
distant & disputed as Pluto. So why not the sorrow
farmer sowing himself in the crosshair
of the oncoming train. I’ve seen in kinder times
the freight cars grind to a halt to let a herd
of elephants pass. That one time outside the train
window: a woman in a niqab, & a ferret-
faced infant on her hips yanking her hair with still
the blind rage of birth, no hope for it, we saw
the brooding swine of a father. The young men
in the compartment each looked on, disbelieving
at first, jealous of the idiot taking her home, then all
at once saddened by her beauty. Apologists
for the low-grade genocide lost for words: the plain
shock at the sight of a great beauty existing
without strife. The train moved along, & for hours
into the evening we nursed that silence to sleep,
& all night the urinous stink moved in the compartments
like an old ghost. The shed & filth cumulating
in the cars by the day’s end. The food, flying spices,
language changing every hundred kilometers,
stations with names like divine nagar, clutter-
buckganj, vestigial as horsehair barrister wigs.
Outside, the elements beating down on the trundling worm
of rust. Outside, the landscape fuzzing across state
lines, airborne viral strains, the dim industry with its sewer
breath at night to the fragrant mist rising off harvest
hay in the morning. Closer to home, I saw a deer stray
into the edge of the monsoon’s verdure. I saw
disappeared children made to beg in the arms of cripples.
I met hucksters who tried to offer me tea with ketamine.
I heard a couple making love inside a coarse blanket
on the upper berth. I saw a leper radiating the same
diameter of horror as the untouchable. And arriving
home, always the bruised sky of dawn telling me
something I knew, for a moment, then didn’t.